Chapter 37: By Man nor Dwer

From behind a leafy berry bush, Gideon and Ryder watched as a herd of assorted animals filed into the forest cave. It was a natural formation, jagged and sudden in the cliffside rocks and covered in a clinging white lattice that looked somewhat like vines. The land seemed to cave in around the entrance that led deep into the planet, though it was hard to tell under the darkness of the trees above. Brilliant gleaming green light spilled out of the orifice, and Gideon had to tightly focus to keep his attention off of it.

 

Why was this light so attractive, anyway? They’d nary seen more than a mouse or two since they split off from the path, but now Gideon could see at least a dozen larger animals, not even to mention the insects and small mammals that walked after them. 

 

Perhaps it was harder to avoid falling for it when you weren’t built for higher level thinking. Though that would imply the only person who would truly be threatened by this thing would be Ryder, Gideon knew that it was still probably a good idea to take it out regardless. It wouldn’t be funny if they heard of people disappearing in the area after they left.

 

“It looks like it's luring those animals inside. We might be able to sneak in among them.”

 

For some reason, that logic struck Gideon as strange, though he couldn’t quite tell why. Perhaps it was how dangerous it could be? That wasn’t really anything new by Ryder’s standards, though. They’d just have to be careful in there, in case it had traps or such in there. How else could such a little floating light hurt them?

 

Do you have a method for attacking the light once we get close? He asked. I didn’t think to bring my potions with me, and it might be immune to physical attacks.

 

Ryder waved him off.

 

“We’ll be fine. I’ll just spatal it into submission if nothing else works, or we can go back…I mean we can see if banishment can work against it.”

 

Gideon nodded.

 

Alright, but let's hurry.

 

He followed Ryder as they joined the animal train, slipping neatly in between two vaguely deer shaped animals with white and brown fur. Interestingly enough, Gideon noticed, none of them seemed to acknowledge their presence and simply kept walking forward as if strung along on a string. Behind them, monsters with teeth larger than Ryder’s hands plodded alongside their usual prey, uncaring for anything but the light ahead. If he were to describe them, the words ‘huge bear’ and ‘antlers’ came to mind, but Gideon couldn’t feel even an oodle of fear as they walked in front of them.

 

“Perhaps her chemicals aren’t as bad as I thought.” Ryder mumbled as he stepped in front of one of the monsters.

 

What?

 

“Eh, nothing.”

 

They followed the light deep into the cave, walking for what felt like forever surrounded by stone. It was a wide and thankfully flat descent, with only a few sudden drop offs that everything could make it over. For the lair of a demon-light, Gideon found it a surprisingly pleasant trip, and it was even more amusing when the bear-likes stopped to help each other over a particularly uneven section.

 

What wasn’t amusing, however, was the scoring on the walls that appeared as they approached the heart of the cave. Deep, straight, grooves were rent into the walls like someone had taken a pressure washer to a giant sugar cube, easily carving two or three inches into the wall. Stained blood adorned most of the gashes, and bone piles became distressingly common as they went further in. Despite this, Gideon kept on after Ryder towards the ever closer light.

 

Eventually the cave opened up, unleashing them into a cavern almost as big as the Astrian’s manor back in the capital. It was a round room, in the shape of a semicircle with countless stalactites hanging from the roof like a thousand icicles. They weren’t alone in there either, and Gideon could recognise the forms of at least two dozen other animals, but he quickly found that he couldn’t bother to notice anything but the one object in the centre of the room.

 

The light! The gleaming, brilliant light! It was unlike anything I have ever seen! Oh diamond underground, oh star of the earth! Such meaning, such toils I’ve suffered! That potion… it led me to this! This is our destiny!

 

“God in heaven.” Ryder stared in awe at the green light, stopping right beside Gideon. “What glorious light! The star… The Everstar! This must be it, hidden underground as the stories say!”

 

Silst has flown a thousand countries to see this! I hope he can see it now, wherever he is.

 

In all his life, as a college student and in his memories as a dragon, Gideon had never seen a sight as glorious as this. How could they possibly have thought that this would be dangerous? No, how had they even lived before they had seen this?

 

Together, they stared at the light, untold time passing without a care. For who could count the minutes while staring at God? Not Gideon.

…

A dark shape moved to my right, but I ignored it.

 

I know the truth now. All of this struggle had been God’s plan all along, all to bring me to this one moment to glimpse the light. As I gazed further into its depths, I saw the face of Truth itself, of Time, and of the Stars. Theories and ideas rushed through my head, enlightenment glowing upon me. And It was Bright.

 

Everything was possible! I knew now that I could do anything now if I wanted. Fly, breathe in water, nothing was out of reach to someone who knew the Truth. If I wanted too, I knew that even the potion recipe we’d struggled so hard for was easily in reach. But why would I want to? Why would I ever want to leave God’s side?

 

The shapes to my right began to shuffle and scratch.

 

Saphry would be fine with this outcome, I knew. If she were here she would appreciate it. I felt no hunger, no thirst, no temperature. Not even Time could distract me. How could any moment ever be so perfect? There was no aspiration I could possibly hold that could compare. To think of anything else was wrong, no, it was sin.

 

I felt a thump as something scaly jostled my thigh.

 

I could only ignore them, and attempt to focus all my attention on the light. How could they bear to interrupt? They should be looking at the Truth. Anything else was meaningless. Life, death, consciousness, sleep, all delusions and perversions of the Truth, and of Time.

 

The light swirled in front of me, like a rainbow through glass.

 

I… I could understand! I was Bright! God’s chosen! Like a river split, I was a part of him! A fragment of his whole! I will be Bright! I am Bright!

 

Time seemed to stop suddenly, as The Light dimmed.

 

I fell to the ground in agony, a shard of myself seemingly ripped out of my core. A horrendous sadness welled up inside me, threatening to tear me in two as a flow of tears gushed down my cheeks. The knowledge slipped away, like sand in an hourglass. My ears rang with a cacophony of bells, deafening me to the world as I sobbed into the floor.

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“Ughh.” I moaned, blinking as my sanity returned. The world seemed dark now, and life vapid.

 

Despite the overwhelming sadness, I knew full well what had happened there. That had been an enchantment, a compulsion over the mind that had grabbed both me and Gideon. All that ‘enlightenment’ had been a delusion, and even now I could see the ‘truths’ and ‘knowledge’ to be gibberish and shallow. The justifications of ‘stopping’ the light had just been our rationalisation for getting closer.

 

And the worst part was that I could remember every obnoxious second of it, unlike the thought demon’s attack. Everything had been visible and normal, only my perception had changed.

 

I wiped away the tears, only for more to take their place. The feeling of loss, unfortunately, was very real, as was the newfound darkness. As I was, I wasn’t sure if it would ever go away.

 

Colourful lights flashed around the room, though they weren’t bright enough to make out anything.

 

Scrambling for my belt, I unhooked the lantern and flipped the shield, only to find a horrible carnival playing out around me as the bells tolled in my ears.

 

An orgy of blood and madness played out around me, as over fifty crazed and starved animals writhed and fought each other. Bear-like monsters with antlers charged and ripped, while white and brown deers stamped over the corpses of mice and birds. The room was stained with blood and viscera, though thankfully none of it was recognisable to me as human. 

 

On the far side, I could see a terrible monster with a bird’s head and long, unsightly limbs. It was taller than the bears, and carried a staff of bloodstained wood in one of its four arms. Its eyes bulged out like those of a dead fish on either side of its head, and its body looked bony through its thick coat of feathers. An ethereal shimmer seemed to hang around it, ripples peeling out like waves in the air around it as it cast magical lights around itself.

 

I watched in horror from my position as the bloodbath unfolded in front of me. A sickness came over me as my sense of smell returned with the heavy scent of ozone mixed with blood, and I quickly doubled over to give the ground my last couple meals. 

 

Why had they all decided to make the room into a carnal pit? Had everything just been stricken mad? And speaking of everything… where was Gideon?

 

I whipped my eyes around the room, idling as little as I could on the entrails being ripped strewn as I searched for the little blue guy. I found him flying around the bipedal bird guy, breathing blasts of ice at the fiend, the rime somehow glowing with a small blue glow.

 

“Gideon!” I waved my arms wildly.

 

We had to get out of here as soon as we could, before whatever was causing that light decided to come back on. It probably wouldn’t be happy to find all of its prey in pieces on the floor, and I really didn’t want to be here to see its reaction.

 

Actually, why had it turned off?

 

I scanned the room again, quickly finding that the light hadn’t actually completely disappeared. On the left side of the room, I could see a dim green orb watching the madness, though only now that its enchantment was gone could I see its true form.

 

It wasn’t just a light at all, rather a creature formed seemingly entirely of glass with a light in the middle. It was large, taller and wider than myself, and formed into a sphere. Coming from the back was a tuft of glass feathers, and small wings of the same sat close to the body on the side. On the front, I could make out a short beak much like a sparrow’s in which a small extinguished lantern hung, and above it two eyes glowing with a dim green darted about curiously. Its legs were short and stick-like, and one of them was cracked at an obscene angle. To me, the proportions just made it look bizarrely cute and squishy, almost the complete opposite of the creepy bird-mage Gideon was fighting.

 

That was what had lured us in? God, we were almost done in by a translucent stuffed animal…

 

Help. Distract.

 

My attention whipped back to my terse drake, whose fight wasn’t going as well as I could’ve hoped. The birdman seemed to deflect his attacks with relative ease, calling forth shields like cards from a deck. It didn’t have the same luck with hitting Gideon though, being too slow to actually hit the cat-sized drake. In fact, it was killing more animals than anything, blasting anything that happened to get too close with bolts of ice.

 

Ice?

 

I watched in awe as it shot out another icicle, pinning an unlucky deer to the floor. Looking closer at the shield, I saw that it too looked a little too closely like those I had used back on Earth.

 

Holy shit, something actually used ice magic in Elys? It wasn’t just me! Or, me and Gideon! To be honest, I had no idea that my friend could even shoot out some breath attack, let alone ice! Wasn’t that an important thing to tell me? Or had he just powered up in the middle of this fight like some sort of shounen protagonist?

 

You know, sometimes I didn’t even feel like the main character of my own life.

 

Regardless of my own awe, I couldn’t very well just sit back and watch after Gideon asked for help, so I dashed forward without any more thoughts. I tried to avoid the insane animals, most of which had either fled or injured themselves too much to move by this point. 

 

As I approached, I saw the tide suddenly turn against my scaled friend, as one of the monster’s clawed arms curved unnaturally through the air to swat at him. Thinking quickly, I leaped as close as I could with a raised arm, summoning forth the easiest spell I could think of. 

 

“Spatal!”

 

A normal spatal wouldn’t get through his shields though. It was just meant to summon a small bit of the element, not be used as an attack, and he even had countermeasures. Using that logic, I decided to pour every rin of mana I currently had into the attack, which would drain me for several minutes, but it was the only thing I could think of.

 

A massive snowball, pumped with way more rin of energy than necessary, ripped out of my arm like a rocket, passing straight through the monster’s shield and impacting its head. It exploded in snow against it, causing the bird to stagger backwards like a drunkard for just a second.  That was enough time for some of Gideon, however, and his icy breath roared through the air and up his arm, freezing it to lifelessness. From my experience back on Earth, I knew it had most likely killed off most of the cells inside, rendering it useless and bleeding until a strong healing spell was applied to it.

 

“Ha!” 

 

I pumped my arm into the air, only to fall back on my rear as the magical recoil hit me. My head swam dizzyingly as I watched the monster stand back up with recharged shields and he refocused his attention back on me. A circle of white and blue formed in front of his outstretched staff, a miracle of magic being summoned forth against me.

 

Ah, shit.